Does dirt that has flown in space grow bigger plants than dirt that has stayed on the ground? How much bigger do crystals grow in space than in a terrestrial lab? Do candles burn differently in space? Because of the summer of 1994 group project, kindergarten through university level students from all over the country have an increased access to space to answer some of these scientific questions.
After hearing about the educational benefit of Space Academy I's group project from Rob Bayt (Indiana), we as Space Academy II (SAII) Research Associates (RA) decided to initiate our own summer group project. Many hours were spent in brainstorming sessions the first two weeks of the Academy to develop ideas for possible projects, until Dr. Soffen suggested that fellow SAII RA Adam London (Massachusetts) contact the Get Away Special (GAS) Program office at GSFC to offer assistance with some educational initiates they were considering.
The GAS Program was initiated in the mid seventies to provide extremely low cost access to space. GAS payloads are carried in standard canisters which can be mounted in a large number of locations on the side of the Space Shuttle payload bay. Unfortunately, as the GAS Program matured, an increasing number of educational institutions who reserved GAS canisters did not deliver their experiment as promised, forcing the Shuttle program to fly empty cans. The complexity associated with integrating an experiment into the GAS can and the required NASA safety reviews were the major stumbling blocks for those experiments that did not fly. Looking forward to Shuttle missions to the Mir space station in which a majority of the payload bay would be empty and available to fly a large number of canisters, the GAS Program was looking to developing a simplified approach for the educational community to fly an experiment on the Shuttle.
When we first met with the GAS Program, they offered our group a canister in which we could fly and provide feedback about the process of preparing an experiment. We spent days trying to come up with a unique experiment we could fly. The more we thought about it, the more we became stumped by technical hurdles. As we researched past experiments that had flown and ones that never made it to orbit, we realized that it seemed that only the most sophisticated experiments, those which had a university or industry partner helping with much of the work, actually made it into space. Likewise, most of the challenges that were solved while preparing the experiment to fly were not shared with others making similar attempts at developing GAS experiments. We thought, if 24 of the brightest university students from all across the US could not come up with a good experiment to fly, imagine the frustration an elementary school teacher must have!
There was also a desire to select a project that was not just "another summer project," but rather we wanted something that could continue after the summer. However, the major factor in selecting our project was to choose something that we could take back to each of our Space Grants at the end of the summer and get them involved. This is why we decided to forfeit the free GAS can (an opportunity most university science and engineering students would jump at) and work on developing a nation-wide program that would increase access to space for educators and students in each state.
The idea we developed in conjunction with the GAS Program was to divide the GAS canister into a number of modules, which the GAS Program later named Space Experiment Module (SEM). Each module could house an experiment developed by a group of students. We decided that it was also very important for the GAS Program to keep a database of experiments that have flown and the hardware they each used so a teacher wishing to modify and experiment that has flown in the past or even develop a new one would know what materials were acceptable. This would reduce some of the apprehension a teacher might feel when developing an experiment and make the NASA review process much easier.
We presented our idea to NASA Senior Policy Advisor, Mr. Alan Ladwig. He was so impressed by the work we had done in only six weeks (he even commented that if NASA would have done a similar study, it would have taken them six months to do the same amount of work) that he called Mr. Owens, Director of NASAÕs Education Division, following the meeting and demanded that he met with us the following day. The first SEM GAS can flew on STS-80 in November of 1996 and it has been designated as a backup payload on Space Shuttle mission STS-87, currently scheduled for October 1997.
If you are interested in participating in the program or want additional information on the GAS Program and the SEM, check out http://sspp.gsfc.nasa.gov or contact the SEM Program Manager, Dr. Ruthan Lewis, at: